Tonight the phone rang while Patrick and I were watching the second episode of Buffy, Season One, on a DVD we'd borrowed from a friend. The action was tense, vampires were leaping out from corners, and we didn't want to answer the phone. Once we did, the news was bad: the bank thought Patrick's debit card number had been stolen and was being used.

Gaaaaaaah. We didn't recognize any of the amounts that had been taken from the account. Much panic. Deep, paralyzing worry.

Guess what? We booked our tickets yesterday through Expedia. Turns out, when all the strange amounts were added together, including some to the Netherlands, they amounted to just about the cost of the plane tickets...which are through KLM, the Royal Dutch airline. So everything seems to be okay after all...although the numbers are, oddly, ever-so-slightly different from what we'd agreed to (for instance, my £106.50 plane ticket turned out to be £106.52...which isn't awful, but is a little weird).

And we have this strange, post-crisis feeling now, despite the fact that it looks like there wasn't a crisis after all.

***

Yesterday, the ever-classy BBC 3 radio station played a lovely madrigal by William Boyce. It's all about a man who's trying and trying to bore something, "but his tool, it was too limber"...until finally, at the end, his wife "gave him her hand".....

At the end of the song, the BBC presenter cleared his throat.

"Well," he said, "there's proof enough that even in the 18th century, audiences weren't necessarily looking for high art music!"

Yes. Quite.